Quartet

"Quartet" from 1981 takes place in Paris in 1927.

Marya Zelli (Isabelle Adjani) and her husband Stephan (Anthony Higgins) in Paris and seem very much in love. One night, Marya and Stephan are in a club and Marya is summoned over to the table of the Heidlers, Lois and E.J. (Maggie Smith and Alan Bates). Lois is a painter and wants the stunning Marya to pose for her.

Stephan is selling stolen art and is arrested and given a one-year sentence. Marya has no work visa. The Heidlers invite her to live in their spare room, which she does.

It turns out that Heidler marriage isn't what it seems to the outside world. The reality is that Lois sort of procures pretty young women for her husband so that he'll stick around. Lois continues to visit Stephan in prison. But once released, he will have to leave Paris, and he will be broke. She's stuck -- she can't possibly be attracted to E.J., who is homely, but then again, it's either that or she lives on the street.

This is a story we've seen before, as in Sister Carrie, where a woman in those days had very few options. It's actually based on a novel by Jean Rhys, which tells the story of her relationship with Ford Maddox Ford.

Hard to believe this is a Merchant-Ivory film, but there it is. The film moves slowly, and at 1:45, it's too long and the people who made the picture knew it - we are treated to no less than three nightclub acts, and they're not short.

The acting, of course, is fantastic, particularly from Maggie Smith, as a woman desperate to hold onto her husband at any cost. Why, we don't know, because they probably don't have much if any sex life. Alan Bates transforms himself into a homely, paunchy man and does an excellent job as a boring satyr.

Until she destroyed her face with fillers and heaven knows what else, Isabelle Adjani was, by a mile, one of the most beautiful women in the world. It's hard to believe her character couldn't find some rich guy to marry and was settling for her unpleasant situation at the Heidlers. In the dresses of the period, she is exquisite. Her acting is excellent -- you can feel her frustration, depression, and acquiescence. Anthony Higgins has the smallest role but is very effective.

The film turned out to be a flat experience. It's a shame because such talent could have been involved in a much more involving story.

Literature cinema maestro James Ivory's 1981 Cannes admission, a film adaptation of Jean Rhys' novel QUARTET, as the name implies, it is a gamble with four participants, aka. two married couples.

In Paris, roaring 20s, the opening credits shift from one hotel to another, augurs the rootless fate of Marya Zelli (Adjani), a young and stunning beauty married to Stephan (Higgins), a handsome but self-interested Polish art dealer, who would soon be put behind the bars for his illegal deals, and leave Marya in penury out of the blue.

Then there is another couple, a wealthy middle-aged English art dealer H.J. Heidler (Bates) and his painter wife Lois (Smith), comes to Marya's rescue, although they only meet her once before, they insist that Marya should live with him under a ménage-à-trois fashion. Soon, we will know that Marya is not the first damsel-in-distress they timely lend a helping hand, a disreputable compromise has been mutually reached between Lois and H.J., as long as H.J. doesn't leave her, she will turn a blind eye on his affaire de coeur with young girls, even under the same roof, "we have a spare room in our apartment".

Marya is easily corrupted by the decadent lifestyle of the Heidlers and their expatriate clique, and after the tentative refusal of H.J.'s advances, she caves in after a bit but inwardly, she still hopes to leave with Stephan after he finishes his one-year sentence, financially dependent on H.J. and Lois, she is unable to make a clean slate even if she wants to. Meanwhile, Lois is also anguished about the inconvenient arrangement, wonders when H.J.'s infatuated phase will end, or this time, it could be herself that be superseded.

Men certainly don't look good in the story, when Stephan is released from the penitentiary, it seems that Marya has a tough call to make, but when everything is laid bare, she doesn't even have that option, on a less pungent note, Ivory invokes the misandry from Rhys' works, women are powerless, without exception, mistreated by men in their lives.

The narrative tweaks and jumps in an upbeat tempo, even when pathos should be evoked, the shot doesn't care to stick around, Ivory's formulaic direction banally basks in its silk-stocking milieu, the plush delicacy of its trimmings, with offbeat notification of a more risqué scenery. Luckily, the two female leads are as presentable as ever, Dame Maggie Smith (who would star in another film with the same name in 2012, a Dustin Hoffman elderly-skewing comedy QUARTET) rarely reveals her vulnerability in front the camera, showcases a master-class endeavour of breakdown which is needed to be GIFed. Adjani, impeccably gorgeous in her prime, and fluent in her bilingual dexterity, launches herself wholeheartedly in the torrent of trepidation, seduction, vacillation and desperation.

Alan Bates is miserly given a stage to justify H.J.'s eloquent equivocation in his immoral business, and Anthony Higgins, whose Stephan takes a back seat among the quartet due to his incarceration, however, flourishes in bringing out a more frank and unapologetic facade of his character although both Stephan and H.J. are equally bad eggs to their women, at least he manifests with a certain flair that's captivating and resolute. Finally, a footnote sends to Sheila Gish, who plays Lois' friend Anna and whose thunder has been stolen by that extraordinary-looking hippopotamus in the zoo. As one of the commodities from Merchant Ivory Productions, QUARTET doesn't represent the best collective results from the Merchant (producer)-Ivory (director)- Jhabvala (screenwriter) trinity, yet, a lavish take of Paris in the early 20th century is something not that common in their repertory, and a BluRay treatment should be taken into consideration in no sooner.

I chose this film to watch at the 2024 Paris Olympic. In bohemian 1920s Paris, young writer Marya finds herself destitute when her art dealer husband Stephan is imprisoned. Rich art patron Heidler and his artist wife Lois offer to take Marya in for the duration of Stephan's sentence. Heidler soon seduces Marya, and Lois painfully accepts his infidelity. This movies Isabelle Adjani in a four-way love affair, Merchant-Ivory's impeccable adaptation invokes the sordid glamor of Jean Rhys's eponymous novel. Waltzing through cozy cafés and sexy nightclubs, Quartet dines on the bohemian hedonism of 1920s Paris while exposing the callousness of the idle rich.

Few screenwriters have ever jumped the gap that Jhabvala traversed between THE EUROPEANS (1979) and QUARTET (1981). I know of no other film that captures as well the sense of European pre-WW2 'decadence' (compare CABARET for an object lesson in failure!), or that is directed and photographed with stronger integration of the settings, colours, sounds and behavior within the story being told. A remarkable achievement - the film that put filmmakers on notice about how well the remarkable Jhabvala/Ivory/Merchant trio present stories locked into their space and time.

Abandoned in Paris with no work permit and no savings, when her art-dealing (illegal) Polish husband is sent to prison, Marya Zelli (Isabelle Adjani) accepts the hospitality of the Heidlers, Lois and H.J.(as Lois invariably calls him) which, probably inevitably, involves her providing bed service to H.J. The video box describes the Heidlers as a "freethinking British couple" - if you can accept a couple, with such limited self-awareness and inability to talk through their problems, as freethinkers.

The film is based on the novel by Jean Rhys, based on her own experiences with Ford Madox Ford who presumably had more going for him than H.J., or else he wouldn't be in all those books on the literature of the twenties. Apparently Ford helped Rhys with her novel, and after he tired of her body got her a ghost-writing job on the Riviera. Rhys' husband was out of prison and had abandoned her before she moved in with the Fords. Presumably her major motivation was her devotion to her writing. Marya Zelli, in the film is not a writer, and she stays in Paris because her husband is still in prison. She says more than once to Lois that if given 100 Fr she would disappear (back to England where she could legally work?) but she gets 250 Fr just before moving in with the Heidlers when she sells almost everything she has to the hotel concierge.

Thus while the film is of the desperation of no choice, Marya has in fact fewer options than the real-life Rhys, and the film ending where Marya is thrown on the mercy of her husband's acquaintance from prison, is very bleak, unlike Rhys' fate of being ejected to a writing job.